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June 30, 2005

"Maven: A Developer's Notebook": Taking the Guesswork Out of Projects

Sebastopol, CA--Maven is the new software project management and
comprehension tool sweeping the Java world. It makes the release process a
science, not a black art. If that sounds exciting, it shouldn't: Maven is
an incredibly boring technology. That's how Jason van Zyl, the founder of
the Apache Maven Project, describes it in his foreword to Maven: A
Developer's Notebook (O'Reilly, US $29.95). "If you
use Maven," writes van Zyl, "your development infrastructure will be so
coherent, predictable, and reproducible that you won't even think about it
anymore. Your development infrastructure will just work. Period."

But what exactly is Maven? As coauthors Vincent Massol and Timothy O'Brien
explain, "Maven provides a rich development infrastructure (compilation,
testing, reporting, collaboration, and documentation) from a simple
description of any Java project. It's an easy way to build a project
without having to build a build system." Maven allows developers to
enforce standards across a project, so that all parts of the project build
in the same way. It puts project-wide mechanisms in place for testing,
report generation, deployment, and publishing. It puts an end to tracking
down and installing obscure-dependencies, and eliminates the need to
reverse-engineer a build project that has grown out of control and is
completely different for each subproject.

As agreeable as that sounds, there is still a learning curve involved in
implementing Maven, particularly if one is applying Maven's project
management capabilities to an existing project. Maven: A Developer's
Notebook is the reference that the Maven community has asked for, written
by authors who have been closely involved with Maven since its early days.
Full of real-life tips and practices, the book teaches developers how to
make their build processes as reliable as they should be, automate
reporting, and in general, take the guesswork out of projects.

Maven started as an attempt to simplify and standardize the complex
Ant-based build process used for the Jakarta Turbine. When Massol first
encountered Maven, he was already completely automating the building of
applications and systems that he was developing, from sources to
deployment on acceptance platforms. "I was using Ant at the time," he
recalls. "The problem was that the Ant build scripts were quickly more
than a thousand lines long and as the number of subprojects was high
(around twenty for the project I have in mind), I had to maintain 20*1000
lines of build code. This was a pain and there was no easy way to
factorize this build code. Then I found Maven." Massol found he had to
participate in the project to make it usable for his own use cases. "This
is how I got involved," says Massol. "I've never looked back."

Working through concrete, realistic situations, readers of Maven: A Developer's Notebook learn how to:

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